As much as I tinkered with a little crystal radio as a child and started reading stereo magazines in high school, it wasn't until my early 30s that I half-stumbled into the higher end of the hi-fi sphere. As I progressed from used Advents to used Spicas and began to experiment with speaker cables, more and more names of high-end brands entered my consciousness. Burmester (founded in 1977), and some of the other higher-priced components from overseas whose looks seemed commensurate with their prices, held an outsized fascination for me. What about them, other than their visual appearance, accounted for their vaunted reputations and cost?

No jazz-centric visit to New York City is complete without a trek out to Queens. At 46th Street in Sunnyside stands the apartment building where famed cornetist Leon Bismark "Bix" Beiderbecke's alcoholism finally killed him in 1931. Farther out, in Corona, is the newly enlarged and expanded Louis Armstrong House Museum. The actual house Armstrong bought in 1943 and lived in until his death in 1971 is just the way it was when his fourth wife, Lucille, died there in 1983. The long white couches, bright blue kitchen cabinets, and wall-mounted reel-to-reel tape decks behind his desk in the upstairs den remain, all extraordinarily well-preserved. Just north of there, in Flushing Cemetery, you can visit Armstrong's grave.

Pops, as he was affectionately known by friends and fans, was an inveterate maker of scrapbooks and tapes of his music. By spring 1969, he had a pair of Tandberg reel-to-reel recorder/players up and running. One of his then-new treasures was a set of tapes made by the BBC from television broadcasts recorded the preceding summer. Music from those tapes—13 tracks in all, four for the first time ever—has just been released on CD, LP, and streaming, as Louis in London.

Throughout my hundred years, I've told everyone who'd listen: If it's adventure you seek, the best way to find it is to stand on the right corner at the right time wearing the right hat, and when the limo pulls up and the driver says, "Get in," do not ask where it is going.

This strategy has served my life story well. It has placed me without striving in countless cinema-worthy locations, hanging with all types of legend-worthy characters.

Lately, that corner where I stand wearing the right hat is in front of the Polish newsstand at the intersection of Manhattan and Greenpoint Avenues in Brooklyn.

New recordings of Julius Eastman compositions aren't as rare as they were a decade ago. Eastman's profile has grown with each repetition of his story, which seems to become more dramatic with each iteration. Trained at the Curtis Institute of Music; worked with Peter Maxwell Davies, Meredith Monk, and Petr Kotik; composed significant works often for instrument multiples (four pianos, 10 cellos); then drugs, homelessness, and dying alone in a hospital at the age of 49. A recent resurrection has brought new recordings, new research, and new visibility. An exciting recent realization of his 1974 composition Femenine, recorded jointly by Talea Ensemble and Harlem Chamber Players, offers fresh perspective. It led me to listen to some older releases, some with the composer himself performing.

In 1989, I bought my second pair of Rogers LS3/5a's from a guy on Staten Island who had them hooked up to a Musical Fidelity A1 integrated amplifier. After playing the speakers for me, he began removing his zip-cord speaker cables and paused to show me how, at the amplifier end, his red-plastic Pomona Electronics banana plugs had partially melted from the A1's heat. We both laughed.

After it first appeared in 1985, the A1 quickly became famous for its hot top plate. The top plate got as hot as it did because it was used as a heatsink for the output transistors, which were biased highly into class-A. The A1's hot top made tabloid headlines, but for me it was its bold, sinewy, un-transistory sound and timeless, sharply drawn styling that distinguished it from cooler running Brit-fi competitors such as Audiolab's 8000A, Creek's 4040, A&R Cambridge's A60, and NAD's 3020.

Now it's back, priced at $1779, looking and feeling cooler than before.